December 4, 2024

PT11-27

Wednesday

I had a short day planned, with off-site commitments, so I got started with the easy work of unclamping and untaping the aft tanks.  These would soon get additional attention to finish off the edges and seal them completely, but for now this was as far as I took it.

My main task for the short day, which fell at this moment mostly by happenstance, was to do the first step of installation for the special connecting hardware in the main bulkhead.  This  custom stainless steel hardware, with little carbon fiber handwheels, was one of the keys to the ease and adaptability of connecting and disconnecting the two hull halves under real-world circumstances.

To begin, I cleaned up the four hardware locations as needed, sanding the faces of the reinforcing pads flat if there was any epoxy in the way, and cleaning out the holes with a bit of sandpaper wrapped around a drill bit, for lack of anything else cylindrical on hand.  I’ve just shown two of the pads below, but I did this cleanup on both sides of all four locations.

Next, I dry-fit the hardware and checked the fit, mainly that there was just a bit of slop in the hole (important for step 2 of the installation process later), and checking the the flanges on both sides fit flat against the pads.

All four sets fit well and as required, so after removing the hardware and final cleanup of the parts and all related surfaces, I installed the hardware with a narrow bead of thickened epoxy along the flanges on both sides.  This was only the first step in a two-step process, and would serve to hold the hardware in place and with both parts properly aligned in the two bulkhead sections.  The second step, which would happen after the boat was cut in two, would fill the space around the hardware with injected epoxy (similar to what I did with the mast tube a little later on this page).  I tightened the bolts enough to hold the parts securely and squeeze out epoxy, but no more.

I finished up by cleaning off the excess epoxy, working carefully in the tight spaces so as not to upset the hardware.

My last task of the day was to fill the spaces around the mast tube–in both the upper and lower partners–with injected epoxy.  The four half-moon holes located evenly around the tube were there for this very purpose, much the same as with the hardware holes in the bulkhead, each of which features one injecting space like this.  I went around several times with a syringe, filling the voids with epoxy, awaiting its self-leveling and bubble-formation, and filling again, till both partners were full of epoxy.  For this step, I left the boat elevated at the aft end, so that the mast tube was vertical, and the partners were level.

Now was the ideal timing for me to depart on my other business and leave both delicate epoxy operations the remainder of the day and overnight to cure.

Total time billed on this job today: 2 hours